Today we released our 2014 global event schedule. Back in 2007, we created The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit because I could see a unique opportunity to bring together the developers, industry leaders and end users (largely from the enterprise) who were creating this thing we called Linux. We knew that face-to-face collaboration amongst disparate yet aligned groups could reap great rewards. Soon we were adding developers and companies from the world of mobile, then embedded computing, then cloud computing, then automotive to events first in North America, then Asia, then Europe. Basically everywhere Linux has gone, we have gone.

The 2014 events schedule, which includes LinuxCon and CloudOpen in North America and Europe, as well as the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Embedded Linux Conference, Android Builders Summit and ApacheCon, among others. LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America will take place this year in Chicago and will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit. LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe will be in Duesseldorf, Germany, along with Embedded Linux Conference, KVM Forum and Linux Plumbers Conference.

If having your own conference means you’ve made it as a software project, the developers of OpenDaylight, the open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, will be celebrating next month. On Feb. 4-5, the inaugral OpenDaylight Summit will take place in Santa Clara, Calif., highlighting the significant backing that the collaborative software project enjoys as SDN becomes an increasingly important part of enterprise computing.

The GStreamer Conference 2013 videos and slides are now available online for anyone curious about GStreamer and OpenGL, Linux multimedia enhancements coming, the Opus and Daala free codecs, PulseAudio, and other open-source media topics.

Since the first issue of Linux User appeared at the end of the last century, the free software community has grown and evolved – bringing in open data, free culture, open hardware – and the nature of its events has changed. The Linux Expo, and Linux User Expo, events of the past were huge corporate affairs, but the coffers of the big companies enabled the .ORG Village to run alongside, providing space for dozens of FOSS projects and organisations.

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)